Making Room in Your Bubble.

Hi guys.

The most popular post on AGlanceThisWay is about setting boundaries and recovering from people pleasing. I wrote these posts over three years ago and yet every week someone on the internet reads these posts because they are searching for answers to help them set boundaries and recover from people pleasing. When I initially wrote these posts I felt like I was the only person who was dealing with this obstacle. I felt like I was drowning in my people pleasing habits and that was really discouraging. I have since discovered that I was not alone and that recovery was possible.I learned that other people were seeking answers and searching for solutions. Last year I was communicating with a blogging mentor and they encouraged me to build on this topic because of my passion and experience. They encouraged me to tell my story and put my journey and recovery out there. I decided to take those posts, add more resources and expand it all into a book. I did this because I figured that if the articles on this blog were helpful then maybe a book that contains more information and more tips and strategies that could be accessed by a wider population might do even more good. This is the first chapter from the book Making Room in Your Bubble: Setting Healthy Boundaries and Recovering from People Pleasing. I hope that you enjoy it and I hope that you find it helpful. If you would like to read the entire book you can find it here as a Kindle Ebook.

Chapter 1

Introduction

There are over 7.125 billion people on the planet and each of us has

a bubble! This is otherwise known as our “personal space”. The

bubble is the area surrounding a person that they have determined is

psychologically theirs. The bubble is imaginary but it is also grounded

in a psychological need to assess danger and mitigate risk in our

physical environment. Our personal space is separated into four

bubbles:

1. Intimate Bubble: Touching, embracing and whispering

2. Personal Bubble: Our good friends and family

3. Social Bubble: Interactions among acquaintances

4. Public Bubble: General Population

These four areas make up how we categorize and then maintain

physical space between ourselves and others in our outside world.

The amygdala part of the brain is what processes strong reactions to

violations of space. Therefore if someone who is firmly in the Public

Bubble attempts to enter your Intimate Bubble uninvited this violation

of boundaries would register in your amygdala and produce a

reaction. In short, “We like our bubble the way it is and don’t

appreciate uninvited changes!” As members of social groups and

families our intimate bubble and our personal bubble are filled with

people that we love and care for. These people are our spouses,

children, parents, friends and loved ones. These are the people who

“get us” and know us intimately. They are in our Inner Circle Bubble

and they are the people that we care about and take care of. These

are also the folks that have the greatest and most frequent

opportunity to violate our most sacred boundaries. This can be

difficult because we want the people in our bubble to be happy

however sometimes their happiness is at our own expense. This can

slowly create a space where personal boundaries are scarce and

people pleasing has taken over. In Making Room in Your Bubble:

Setting Healthy Boundaries and Recovering From People Pleasing

you will give yourself permission to put you back inside your bubble.

Once upon a time I was the biggest people pleaser on the planet.

Well, that statement probably isn’t grounded in facts but it sure felt

that way. I was moving along through life making sure that the people

in my bubble were OK. I was married with kids and my entire life had

become consumed with other people’s needs and desires. I was

trying to keep people happy and in the mean while I felt that I was lost

and drowning. It was so bad, if asked; I honestly couldn’t give my

opinion if I thought it was in opposition to another person’s opinion. It

felt like I was living in a tiny fish bowl with nothing to do but swim

around and around in tiny circles. I had so much anxiety and guilt that

I wasn’t able to really function in life. I really wanted to blame other

people for my conditions. I felt that I had to work for other people’s

love and acceptance. I felt that if I didn’t get the love and acceptance

that I was working for then I wasn’t “good enough”. I felt that I had

been victimized.

The result of this kind of thinking is feeling that you have no choice.

It’s the thought “Everyone else can choose but I can’t”. The truth is

that I always had a choice. Even when it seemed that I didn’t, the

choice was still mine to make. Oh, how I struggled to live in this

concept. I constantly went back and forth between guilt and

exhaustion. How dare I feel that I want something that benefits only

me!

Have you ever felt that way? Have you ever wondered when it would

be your turn? When are you going to be able to breathe (all the while

knowing that the guilt of being focused on only you would be

unbearable)? The kids need things, your spouse need things, the job

needs things, your mother needs things, your in-laws needs things,

the dog needs things…all day it goes around and around until you fall

into bed exhausted and anxious. When you wake up it all begins

again. Before you can open your eyes and get your feet flat onto the

floor someone, somewhere, needs something. The constant influx of

demand is sort of unavoidable in today’s culture. We can’t stop

people from asking us for things. We can’t stop text messages from

showing up uninvited as they interrupt and intrude on whatever else it

going on. Emails download to our tablets as they come into our

inboxes. I think, at this very moment I have eleven email addresses

dumping into my “All Inbox” in my iPhone. Folk need things and

people want things and dogs must have…stuff. It’s “stuff” all day long

and into the night! To me, this is part of what it means to be an Urban

Mom. Our space is densely populated with tons of other people’s

stuff. It’s stuff on stuff and the demand is constantly changing. As

soon as you think you’ve identified, customized, trained and

implemented a system to manage it all the oldest kid hits puberty and

the ground under your feet moves again! There’s a lot to keep up with

and the demand isn’t going to stop. The problem arises when we feel

that we must personally meet those needs no matter what. We are

not everyone’s solution.

Rewind about four years ago and I was right there. Unhappy. Not

unhappy with my life in general but there was this undercurrent of

anxiety and guilt that just tagged along. This undercurrent was strong

some days and other days it played the outfield, but it was always

there. What’s really wild is that I knew I was unhappy but I could not,

for the life of me, put my finger on exactly what I was unhappy about.

I was feeling like a victim to life. When you’ve made a practice of

pushing your feelings to the side and telling yourself that things will

be better “later” you run the risk of forgetting what you need. This

activity won’t stop you from needing to deal with that nagging

emotional neglect. There will be a reaction. Trust me. I know.

While my husband and I were dating our Pastor introduced us to a

book by Dr. Henry Cloud. The book is titled Changes That Heal. We

are both intense readers and it happened that I was about to finish a

book and had room to begin reading a new one. I downloaded

Changes That Heal and began reading it immediately. This was one

of the best decisions I could have made and it was also one of the

roughest. Dr. Cloud whipped my emotional hinny from here to the

other side of the world and back again. It was a blood bath and I was

the one bleeding. It would get so intense that I had to stop reading

and not touch the book for a week. I would spend that week just

dealing with it all and recovering from the “emotional surgery”. It hurt

so good!

I realized during this time that I was grieving the loss of so much in

my life. Previously I was a married, home-schooling mom who ran a

business from home, living in a three bedroom town house in a small

sweet bay town and had an awesome community of believing friends.

Now I was a divorcee, single working mom with a failed business,

back in the workforce with kids in public school, living in a one

bedroom apartment (with mice) in a major city almost three hours

from my loving community! I had grieved the obvious stuff like the

loss of my marriage and the “new normal” but what Dr. Cloud’s book

brought up was all the other loss that I hadn’t grieved. All of the

emotions that I had not acknowledged or told myself I had time to

feel. I had experienced so much pain, loss, betrayal and

disappointment all while trying to protect innocent children that I had

stopped myself from actually feeling it all. Well, as they say, those

chickens finally came home to roost. All of that stuff came flooding in

and I was a soggy sight. My then fiancé was probably thinking “What

in the world woman?!” but he was so supportive. He didn’t flinch

when I burst into tears for no apparent reason and didn’t leave the

table when it happened over lunch in a cute little sandwich shop. He’s

amazing like that. This was some serious emotional work and it was

hard but it was the beginning of really dealing with my seeming

inability to set healthy boundaries and my penchant for people

pleasing.

In working on dealing with my people pleasing ways I found that, in

time, I was becoming more and more aware of my internal

environment. If I started to feel bad with no reason or if I started to

feel unexpectedly anxious I was able to stop myself and identify what

was going on. I was also able to reach back into my past and identify

times when I had similar unexpected emotional upheaval. My heart

was telling me that I was way over due in the self-care department

and I needed to stop and get a grip on my life. What I learned later is

that this is actually called a crisis. Can you believe that? It’s true. A

crisis is when the people who should know what to do, don’t know

what to do. It’s just that simple. I realized that I was in and out of

crisis since before the kids were born and some 7 years later I was

still in and out of those same crises. As humans do, I learned to cope

with crisis. I learned how to make things work by over compensating,

enabling, setting zero boundaries, lowering my personal expectations

and avoiding conflict at all cost. I was good at this stuff. I knew how to

cope with the best of them. The only thing was that I was learning to

cope with crisis without accepting that I was causing the crisis.

I was reading my bible one day and saw a scripture that jumped out

at me and hollered “Hey! Pay attention to me!!”

Work willingly at whatever you do, as though you were working for

the Lord rather than for people. Colossians 3:23

“…rather than for people.” Those words just hung in the air and in my

mind like a moment of clarity. I wasn’t supposed to make myself

responsible for other people. I wasn’t supposed to let things digress

into “Danita, Personal Pacifier.”

I took all of those crazy feelings and my hurt heart and prayed for

even more direction. I was dealing with the major issues but it was

now time to deal with the habits that those major issues had inspired.

I knew that this wasn’t going to be a matter of knowing something and

then magically everything was all better. I knew that I needed to

reprogram my mind and my heart. God, in His usual faithful way,

answered my prayer by showing me what was really going on: I had

relinquished my own autonomy and was allowing what I thought other

people wanted to run my life. I did all of this in the name of OPO:

Other People’s Opinion.

I was allowing my life to be ruled by the opinions of others and it had

to stop if I was ever going to be free of the guilt and the sense of

internal suffocation.

What major life issues have you experienced and how have you

adapted? While learning to adapt, what habits have you

developed that need to be reassessed?

~Your Journal Space~

_______________________________________________________

Chapter 2

Being Mrs. Nice

“If it’s in my power to help, I will.”

The mantra of people pleasers around the world.

In the life of a recovering people pleaser there is no immediate room

for the mantra “If It’s In My Power to Help, I Will”. One day you will be

able to handle this but for now, recovering People Pleasers need to

change the scope of this statement before assimilating it back into

their value system. Until this happens it is best to give “If it’s in my

power to help, I will.” a time-out so things don’t go to the extreme.

A few years ago a friend asked me to take on a position in a very

small non-profit organization that served youth.

If you would like to read the rest of Making Room in Your Bubble: Setting Healthy Boundaries and Recovering From People Pleasing click here. Thank you for hanging out with us!

Love,

Danita

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